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Was Jesus an “atheist” because he taught that God is within you?

Posted by on Monday, June 6th, 2016 in Minister

Hespeler, 5 June, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Communion, New Members
Psalm 139:1-12, Matthew 6:5-15, Romans 8:26-27
       There is one very big assumption that lies behind all of our religious and spiritual practices. It is an assumption that is so taken for granted that I think we almost forget that it’s there. The assumption is this: we assume that God exists out there somewhere.
        It is an assumption that goes with the very idea of existence. Existence, as an idea, implies existence within a certain space. Now, of course, we may not know where that “somewhere” is in the case of God. We would actually resist being very specific about the place where God exists because we’re really not very sure about that.
        People used to talk about God being “up there,” but I’m not so sure we’re as comfortable with that phrase anymore. People used to mean it literally. They actually imagined God as being right up there – just beyond the solid blue dome of the sky looking down upon us – but we got a little bit too sophisticated (what with things like space exploration and satellites and such) to think about it that way anymore. So we tend to be careful not to be too specific about where God is out there, but everything we do in our religion assumes that God is somewhere.
        This assumption has driven most religious activities for millennia. The things that human beings do in our temples and our churches – rituals, sacrifices, hymns, prayers – have all been carefully designed to attract the attention of whatever deities people have worshipped and to persuade those gods to send their blessing, salvation and healing our way.
        In ancient times this might have been something as simple as sending the smoke of your offering up into the sky as this giant beacon to attract God’s attention with both sight and smell. There are places in the Bible that talk about sacrifices in exactly those terms. As ancient societies developed, worship practices became more sophisticated. Some cultures developed musical and dance traditions. The Greeks invented theater which was, in its origins, a sacred practice that was meant to earn the favour of the gods with performances. In fact, most forms of art had their origins in the attempts of humans to get their gods to pay attention. It is one of the great contributions of religion to human culture. In fact, if religion never gave us anything more than the music of Mozart and the paintings of Da Vinci, that would be enough to say that the whole enterprise was worthwhile.

        And then, of course, there are the prayers that are such an essential part of our spiritual and religious practices. Prayer is, generally, seen as a way of communicating with a God who exists somewhere out there. Somehow, it seems, God is out there monitoring the things that we say – especially when we take on certain religious postures or enter religious places. When you get on your knees and clasp your hands and bow your head, it is like you are putting out an antenna to better transmit your signal. When we enter together into a place like this and enter into prayer with one another, it is like we are entering into a broadcasting booth – into the heart of spiritual equipment that has been designed to boost and amplify signals by joining them all together.
        Of course, one of the other things that we do to get God to notice us is the same kind of thing that we do in most any social situation. When you want to be noticed in your social group, what you usually try to do is make sure that you stand out from the group in some meaningful way. We try to be better or stronger or wittier or sometimes needier than everyone else and think that that will get us more attention. Sometimes it even works. When we apply that logic to our relations to a God who is somewhere else, people often try to get God’s attention by being better or more righteous or more pious than other people.
        This is how it has always been – how religion has always worked. And it has always been based on that one key assumption that God exists out there somewhere and that we need to make contact with God. But what if that assumption – the one that all religion is built on – is false?
        I know what you’re thinking: that’s blasphemy. That is a denial of God because if God doesn’t exist somewhere then God doesn’t exist at all and that is atheism.
        Well, if that is what atheism is, then it might just make Jesus an atheist. Now, of course, Jesus believed in God – he talked about God and trusting in God all the time. But Jesus certainly had some very interesting ideas about how we were supposed to connect with that God. In particular he had some very strong ideas about religious practices and especially about prayer.
        Jesus taught his disciples, “whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward.” Now, part of what Jesus is saying there is that he really has no patience with people who use external displays of religiosity and piety as a way to advance themselves and their standing within the community. This kind of thing was very common in Jesus’ time and he absolutely found it annoying and hypocritical.
        But there is something more in this teaching of Jesus than just a disdain of hypocrisy. I mean, yes, Jesus dislikes how people are more interested in impressing other people than they are in connecting with God, but he seems to be equally concerned that the God that they are looking to connect with is not where they think God is. God is not out there but rather in here. God is not in public but rather in secret. So Jesus goes on to say, “whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
        The God that Jesus is talking about here is completely different from the general concept of God that is and has been common throughout most of human history. Now, that is not to say that Jesus is the first or indeed the only one to conceive of God this way. The God that Jesus is talking about is the same God who is described in the Psalm that we read this morning. In it the Psalmist fantasizes about going somewhere to escape the presence of God and discovers, somewhat to his surprise, that there isn’t any such place: “If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.”
        What he is describing here are the limits of the entire universe as they were understood at that time. They saw everything that existed as a three-tiered universe – like a three layer cake with heaven on top, the earth in the middle and Sheol or the place of the dead underneath. They thought that the universe began in the place where the sun rose in the morning in the east and ended where it went down in the sea to the west. So the author is imagining an impossible journey to the extreme limits of the universe as he sees it.
        If we were to map what this Psalm is saying onto our modern understanding of the limits of the universe we would have to say something like, “If I descend into the black hole that is at the centre of the Milky Way you are there; if I travel to the edge of the galaxy at the farthest end of the universe, you are there. If I travel back in time to the moment of the Big Bang or move ahead to watch the last light in the universe go out, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.” The picture is very clearly of a God who is present in every conceivable corner, and a number of inconceivable corners, of the known and unknown universe.
        Think of it this way: God is not merely a being who exists somewhere. God is being itself. Even better, God is the source of all being – the very foundation of all existence.
         So the notion that God, rather than merely being someplace, is actually everyplace is certainly older than the time of Jesus. But it seems to me that Jesus, displaying a unique understanding of the true nature of God, finally explained to us the true implications of such a concept of God.
        Jesus is explaining in this passage that communication with the divine is simply not what we have always assumed. Most especially, it is not communication with some external being who communicates with us from a distance. The God we worship doesn’t need our religious practices and prayers in the traditional way that we have thought of them because God is not at a distance from us.
        So Jesus rightly says that when you have a need or a request or a concern, you don’t need to tell God about it because God isn’t someplace else looking on while you try and explain to him what you need. If God is to be found everywhere, then God is to be found within you. In fact, Jesus is saying, God already knows what you need and what is really bothering you far better than you do.
        Of course, you may ask, if God is really that present within you, then why pray at all? That is a very good question. The fact of the matter is that God doesn’t need our prayers. For that matter, God doesn’t need any of our religion. Does God need our praise? Does God need us to say, “How great thou art?” Of course not, God already knows how great God art. God doesn’t need any of it. So why do we do it? We do it because we need it – in fact, we need it desperately.
        We need to pray, not to fill God in on what is going on, but because we need to verbalize the things that we struggle with. We need to come to terms with them so that healing can begin. And sometimes, when we don’t have the words for what we need and all we can do is groan in our pain or grief, we need to do that. But God is not some distant and detached observer as we do that. When we are in that prayer, God enters into the words or the griefs or the feelings with us. That’s what Paul means when he writes, “we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”
        So more than anything, prayer, like many of the spiritual or religious practices that we engage in, is about opening ourselves up to the God who is already present with us in our longings, fears and woundedness. It is about making ourselves aware that we are not alone in what we face.
        I do believe that God hears and answers our prayers. I do believe that God does heal us when healing is what we need (though, of course, healing can take many forms and we may not always get the kind of healing that we think that we need). But what I don’t believe is that God does any of this as some external being who is separated from us by time and space. God is not some being hanging around on some cloud somewhere who occasionally tunes into our prayers and, when he feels like it, decides to send some miracle in our direction. That is not the God that Jesus believed in. That is not the God that Paul worshipped. Nor is it the God that the writer of Psalm 139 discovered to his amazement.
        But it is the God that most human beings throughout most of human history have imagined themselves dealing with. I think that we are increasingly finding ourselves in an age, however, where such a concept of God will no longer work for many people.
        But that is okay, because we can see God in a radically different way – the way that Jesus actually spoke of his father in heaven. We have a God who doesn’t need to exist in any particular place – a God who we can just know is with us. That was all that ever really mattered.
        Let this concept of God challenge the way that you pray and transform the ways that you practice your spirituality. Let it set you free. I know many people who tell me that they are afraid to pray or to try out other spiritual practices such as meditation or contemplation because they are worried that they will not do it right. Be reassured that there is no right way of doing such things because God is not watching you from some distance judging the quality of your prayers. God is within you participating in your prayers and that is what makes them worthy.

        

#TodaysTweetableTruth God's not out there someplace. God's with us & that should transform our prayers, faith & all our spiritual practices.

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Welcoming New Members

Posted by on Sunday, June 5th, 2016 in News

Worship this morning was a wonderful experience.
The Youth Band played for us; Jean M. sang a beautiful solo for the first time ever and we were blessed to have seven people make their Profession of Faith.

Welcome to our new members!


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Some great things are happening this Sunday at St. Andrews.

Posted by on Thursday, June 2nd, 2016 in News

  • We will be joyfully welcoming seven people as they make their profession of faith and become full members in the church.
  • The Youth Band will be performing "Talking to the Moon" by Bruno Mars, Ari Levine, Philip Lawrence, Jeff Bahsker, and Albert Wrinkler
  • For the first time, Jean M. will be singing a solo for us: "No Greater Love" by Ralph Carmichael. Way to go, Jean!
  • We will celebrate communion at the table that our Lord, Jesus, provides!
  • Sermon title: "Was Jesus an 'atheist' because he taught that Jesus is within you?
Wouldn't this be a great opportunity for you to invite a friend to experience what we do at St. Andrew's Hespeler?
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Was Jesus and “atheist” because he taught that God is a circle dance?

Posted by on Monday, May 23rd, 2016 in Minister

Sermon Video:



Hespeler, 22 May, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Trinity Sunday
John 17:1-4, 20-24, Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31, Philippians 2:1-11
I
f you are ever invited to a Greek wedding, you ought to expect that a number of great things are about to happen to you. You can be sure that you are going to have a great time. You can be sure that there’s going to be excellent food and excellent wine and probably healthy servings of Uzo. There will be people yelling “Opa!” and (warning) some dishes may be broken. But, best of all, you can also be sure that, somewhere in among the celebration, the music will start and people will stand up and form a circle and begin to dance.
        The circle dance has been a part of Greek culture for a very long time. It is almost something that is programmed into the people themselves. A celebration, for them, is just not complete until at least three people (it cannot be done with two) have stood in a circle and danced around each other, in and out, in a constantly changing circle. They do the intricate steps, move in and out, under and over. The dancers begin to move faster and faster in perfect harmony until it is like the individuals fade away and it seems that all you can see is the blur of movement that makes up the whole. No one knows how old the circle dance is, but we can be pretty sure that it is at least as old as the Cappadocian Fathers.
        The Cappadocian Fathers were three important church theologians who lived in the middle of the late fourth century of the common era in Cappadocia – a region in the centre of modern Turkey. Their names, just in case you want to find them in your great Christian theologian trading cards collection, are Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea; Gregory, bishop of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus. And it is important to note one other thing about these three learned men: they may have lived in the territory we call Turkey, but they were ethnically and culturally Greek. This is actually quite important as you will see.

        The really hot topic, in the days of the Cappadocian Fathers, was the trinity. The puzzle was basically this: Jesus and the New Testament writers had described their experience of God in a surprising and unprecedented way. Though they had experienced the unity of God – had known that God was one – they had specifically experienced God in three distinct ways: as God the Father and Creator, as God the Son and Redeemer and as God the Spirit and Sustainer. Though the Bible never actually says, not in so many words, that God is three in one and one in three, some sort of Trinitarian formul­a­tion was really the only way to make sense of what the Bible did say about God.  
        So, by the time the Cappadocian Fathers came along, the basic Trinitarian notion of God – one God experienced as Father, Son and Holy Spirit had been pretty well established. What the Cappadocians were trying to do was wrap their minds around how the various persons of the trinity related to each other and to us human beings. They were wise enough to realize that their poor human words could never precisely describe the functioning of the divine. What they did feel that they could do, however, was find a metaphor. They could paint some sort of picture and say, well, God is something like this.
        And they did come up with a metaphor. They said that God was a perichoresis. Perichoresis is a Greek word that means rotation. And, if you listen to the way that these men described God as a rotation (and you remember that they were Greek) it becomes clear that the specific kind of rotation they were thinking of was a circle dance.
        Now, let me ask you, when you hear me (or someone else) say or do something “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” what sort of picture does that draw in your imagination? I’ll bet that, for most of you, if you were forced to draw a picture of that formulation, you would come up with some sort of image of three static figures – perhaps an old man with a beard, a younger man who looks something like Jesus and some sort of a ghost or perhaps a dove to represent the Spirit.
        That is what we tend to do when talking about the trinity. We imagine three distinct persons and then we try to find a way to blend them together. I’ve heard people talk about how one individual may play different roles in their life. One woman, for example, can be a mother in one part of her life, a daughter in another and a sister in another. I’ve heard people talk about the three parts of an egg – the yolk, the white and the shell. These are all attempts to wrap our human minds around a concept of the divine that cannot be understood with the human mind. They are metaphors that can be sometimes helpful to us in our understanding and imaginations and that can sometimes be very unhelpful.
        Imagining God as a circle dance is, in essence, just one more metaphor among many others, but this metaphor may be more helpful than some of the others. While most of the other ways we imagine the trinity seem to be static, the image of a dance is all about movement. After all, if you put three people together in the centre of a dance floor and they just stand there – if they do not dance – they remain separate beings. But if they start to move in concert with each other, you suddenly have something new on that dance floor: you have the dance. And when you put some really good dancers together, they can produce something that is better and greater and more beautiful than anything that the individual dancers could ever do on their own. The wholeof the dance is greater than the sum of its individual parts: the dancers.
        So imagine God this way. God is what is present when the individual members of the trinity (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) start to dance together. God, as such, does not have any existence apart from the dance, nor does God need to exist apart from the dance because it has been ongoing from before the very beginning of creation and it will never end.
        You can also understand just about everything that the Bible tells us about God or the persons of the trinity as movements in a great cosmic dance. We hear of God the Father who creates, chooses, blesses, judges and sometimes punishes. These are all steps in a dance towards and away from humanity and this world and its issues.
        We read about God the Son who is begotten of the Father, who, in our reading from the Gospel this morning is sent into this world, who in the Letter to the Philippians, empties himself, takes on the form of slave and becomes fully human. We have his death, resurrection and ultimate exaltation at the right hand of God. These are all steps in and out and around humanity and ultimately encompassing the whole of creation.
        The movements of the Holy Spirit, though not particularly featured in our readings this morning, may also be seen in terms of dance steps. From the movement of the Spirit over the face of the waters at the very beginning of creation to the descending like a dove upon Jesus at the time of his baptism to the Spirit coming like tongues of fire upon the church at Pentecost and working and moving within believers everywhere bringing us together and making us one, God’s Holy Spirit is found dancing among us, in us and through us.
        Now every dancer in this great circle dance of the trinity has his own steps and her own movements. (Gender, by the way, really doesn’t matter very much when you are discussing matters of the nature of God. Gender is a human construct.) But here is why it matters that you think of the trinity as a circle dance. Each movement alone is really nothing without the coordinated movement of the others. Only when they move in concert with each other does any of it make any sense. So it is with the trinity. None of the actions of God throughout the history of the world make any sense unless you see them within the internal relationship of the dancers of the trinity.
        So when, for example, Jesus talks about his own relationship with God to his disciples in the Gospel of John – when he talks about the relationship between the eternal Father and the eternal Son – we see that the dance between the Father and the Son is so intricate that you can scarcely define the one without reference to the other. “Father,” Jesus says, “the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.” It is like the glory of the one cannot exist without the glory of the other. They are in continual exchange of glory, love and grace within that unbroken dance. This, above all is what makes them who they are.
        Jesus goes on to say, “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” This stresses the unity, the oneness of God but, interestingly, it seems to be a oneness that we are only able to know because of a dance move where the Father sends the Son away. A movement of sending the Son away from the Father would seem, you would think, to separate, not unite, the deity, but here we are told that it actually reinforces the unity of God. That is because the sending is a move in the great dance – a move towards humanity which is the most important movement of all.  
        But that is not the most interesting thing about all this that I see as I read this prayer of Jesus, who is praying for the church in the Gospel of John. Jesus repeats over and over again that God is one in this passage. But he also makes it clear that this unity of God is not exclusive to God. In fact, practically every time that Jesus refers to the oneness of God, he also seems to pivot that immediately to speak of our unity as the church.
        For example, Jesus says, “The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. “ He is saying that the ultimate proof of the oneness of God is not to be found in theological discussion or intellectual speculation about the nature of God, but rather in our own personal experience of unity in the church. If we are one with each other, that is the only thing that can give us a glimpse of the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
        In other words, if the trinity is a circle dance it is the kind of circle dance that you do not understand and you are not meant to experience as a spectator. In order to get the concept of God that is presented in this image, you have to get up on your metaphorical feet and enter the dance for yourself. It is the practical things that we do for one another to support and help each other that allows us to even get a sense of how God operates as one.
        All of our attempts to intellectually understand and explain the nature and the internal relationship of the trinity will fail. We cannot describe it or explain it. Our human brains are not big enough to comprehend it. Our human language has not the words to express it. But we can experience it. We can experience it by choosing to care for one another, learn from one another and accept one another despite all of our differences and all of the things that could divide us. Do that, and you enter the dance together with Father, Son and Holy Spirit and once you are in the dance, you don’t need to explain these things because you are part of them and they are part of you.
        So if you want to understand the nature of the trinity, don’t try and reduce it to words and explanations. That will always fall far short. Get on with the hard work of caring for one another and loving one another.
        I think the Cappadocian Fathers may have been onto something when they chose to describe God as a circle dance. Of course, it was a radically different way of understanding God from what anyone had ever said before. Some found it so strange that they would accuse the Christians of being atheists because their concept of God was so different from what anyone had ever thought of before. Did the Cappadocian Fathers care about that? No, somehow I think that they were far too busy dancing with the divine.

#TodaysTweetableTruth 1 image that helps describe the trinity is a circle dance, an image you can grasp by entering into that dance yourself
                
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It is like an IV hooked up directly to your ears with a constant drip of wisdom

Posted by on Monday, May 16th, 2016 in Minister

About a year and a half ago, my doctor suggested to me (rather firmly) that I really needed to lose some weight. I fortunately took his advice seriously and decided to make some changes in my lifestyle. One of the key changes that I made was to become much more active. The activity that suited me best and that gave me the most pleasure was walking. I bought a step tracker and over time set a goal of walking about fourteen and a half kilometers a day.

I have greatly enjoyed it and feel much better and healthier overall. But I might not have stuck to it as well as I have if had not had something to stimulate my mind while I was exercising my body.

Walking with other people has its own rewards, of course and I love those times. But I also look forward to those times when I am walking alone because I tend to listen to podcasts.

I was realizing the other day that these podcasts I have been listening to pretty much every day have been an extraordinary blessing to me. They have helped me to grow and learn. They have made me laugh and cry. Sometimes, when I am walking, it is like I have an intravenous hooked to my ears and it is feeding me a constant drip of wisdom, hope and new perspectives. I have grown to love my podcasts.

I do have one problem, though. I listen to them so often that I run out of fresh podcasts on a regular basis and end up going through old reruns. So I thought I would take the opportunity to share the podcasts that have been a particular blessing to me with my friends so they might have the chance to try them out. I'm also selfishly hoping that others will take the opportunity to share their favourites with me so that I might find some new ones to love.

Here are the podcasts that have been a consistent blessing to me. I know that many of them are already well known and popular, but that doesn't mean that everyone has heard of them. I myself hadn't heard of some of the best known until recently. Hope that they might be the blessing to you that they have been to me:

Canadaland, Canadaland Commons, Canadaland Shortcuts

This trio of podcasts is always interesting, engaging and challenging. Canadaland exists primarily to engage critically with Canadian media and often has very important comments to make on how our media works (and fails to work) in this country. It also generally helps to keep me informed of what is going on in our country and what the challenges and needs of the day are. Sadly, I often don't seem to get this awareness from anyplace else.








The Liturgists Podcast

The Liturgists do very good work raising and discussing issues in progressive Christianity. They will push you to think about your Christian faith in new and challenging ways. Some of their episodes on topics like LGBTQ issues and Racism have been extremely moving and uplifting.












Ask Science Mike

Science Mike (Mike McHarge) is one of the liturgists on the Liturgists Podcast and I enjoyed his wisdom for the longest time before I realized that he had his own podcast where he answers people's questions on science, faith and life. He has a marvelous perspective as a science geek who has a very thorough understanding of things like physics, neurology and sociology. He started out as a deacon in a Southern Baptist Church, when through a time as an atheist before returning to faith as a sort of a post-orthodox Christian mystic. All I can say is that it all make for very interesting podcast episodes.





The Robcast

I am assuming that Rob Bell's Robcast is the best known of all the podcasts mentioned here so I probably don't need to say too much about it. Let me just say that I haven't enjoyed all of the episodes I've listened to, but the ones that I just loved have been so amazing that they would make up for listening to many many hours of less inspiring stuff.











History in the Bible Podcast

 Okay, I just love how Garry Stevens says, "All the history in all the books in all the Bibles." He is mostly just running through the narratives of the Hebrew Bible - retelling the story in ways I can relate to. It is helpful because he will often remind me of something in those narratives that I have missed or forgotten. From time to time he will launch into an explanation of the critical work that has been done on the Bible from a scholarly point of view. A lot of this is what I learned in my studies, of course, but I never mind the review and, often enough, I learn something that I missed or have forgotten.






The Memory Palace

Nobody but nobody can tell a story from history better than Nate DiMeo. I mostly listen because I'd love to be able to learn to tell a story like him.




















So there they are, the podcasts that have most helped me to learn and grow over the last year or so. I am so thankful for the work that these people do and how they make it available to everyone to just download and listen.

So what are yours? What do you listen to and how have they changed your life?
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Was Jesus an “atheist” because he taught that God is Spirit?

Posted by on Sunday, May 15th, 2016 in Minister

Hespeler, 15 May, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Pentecost
John 4:7-24, Galatians 5:16-26, Acts 2:17-21
I
f you were to ask me the question, “Do you believe in God? I would answer that question without a moment of hesitation: “Do I believe in God? Yes, of course I believe in God.” In fact, that is kind of the obvious answer for someone in my position to give. It is an answer so obvious that, in general, nobody would even bother to ask the question.
      In fact, being a Christian is one of the things that offers me continual assurance that, yes, there is a God because, you know, sometimes I look around at the world and I see everything that goes wrong and it does make me wonder. When I do start to wonder like that, the thing that often reassures me that there is a God who exists and cares is what I have heard and learned from Jesus.
      That is why I was surprised to learn recently that one of the really big problems that ancient pagans had with Christians back in the bad old days of the Roman Empire was that they considered us to be atheists.
      I mean, you could say a lot of bad things about Christians. We have our flaws and shortcomings and failures. But not believing in God? I wouldn’t call that one of them.

     So I’ve thought about that accusation over the last little while. I’ve thought about it a lot. Why would pagan Romans accuse Christians of being atheists? And I get, of course, that the pagans were a bit upset that the Christians wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of their gods. But this was about more than just a question of Christians refusing to recognize Jupiter or Mars or Mercury. To tell the truth, the traditional Roman religions had been on the decline for years before the Christians ever showed up on the scene.
      No, this wasn’t just about protecting the status or worship of any particular gods. This was about the Christians challenging the very concept of divinity that the Greco-Roman world had. The problem was that the Christians were a-theists. The problem was that they did not believe in theos, which was the Greek word for the concept of divinity.
      And, you know what, in that sense, I think that the critics of Christianity may have been right. Starting with the very words of Jesus and continuing through the life of the early church, the Christians had ways of talking about and interacting with God that totally blew that Greek concept away. If you listened – I mean really listened – to Jesus and his disciples you simply would not have been able to conceive of God in the same way again.  
      Think, for example, of the way that Jesus speaks of God in our reading this morning from the Gospel of John. Jesus is engaged in a conversation with a Samaritan woman about matters of religion. Jesus has just said something to her that has made her realize that she is not just talking to an ordinary person – that he can somehow speak for God. And her immediate response is to ask him a religious question: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but [Jews like] you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”
      The question she is asking is a theistic question. It is the kind of question that Romans might ask about their gods. Where is the best place to worship Jupiter, they might ask. The name of the god might be different but the concern is exactly the same. There are all kinds of assumptions behind a question like that. She is assuming that God requires a certain sort of worship from us. She is assuming that place matters when it comes to such worship. Even more important, she is assuming that worship, properly done in proper places, will influence God to act in certain ways.
      And everyone in that world at that time would have expected Jesus to jump into that argument and explain to the woman exactly why it was right and good to worship God only in a particular place – in the temple in Jerusalem. Because if anybody in that world knew anything about gods (and this includes both Jews and Gentiles) they knew that it was vastly important that you access those gods in the right ways and in the right places.
      But, while Jesus does acknowledge that, historically speaking, Jerusalem is the place for accessing God, he also says that that is no longer true now. In fact, he announces a brand new insight into the nature of God: “God is spirit,” he says, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” And there, right there, you have one good explanation for why people accused Jesus’ followers of being atheists.
      You see, the whole development of religion is one of the ways in humans have always dealt with the basic fears that come with life in this very unpredictable world. I mean, who can stand going through this world and just not knowing what terrible thing might happen next? Sickness and disease, war and pestilence, accidents and all kinds of other terrible things that can go wrong seem to shadow our every moment of existence as human beings on this planet. And, most terrifying of all, so much of it seems to happen for no apparent reason.
      And so people looked to their gods to explain these things and especially to find a way to control all of the terrible and frightening things that seem to happen in this world. Religion developed as a way to control the things that happen to us by controlling the gods who make these things happen. Holy sites were chosen, temples were built and priests are consecrated to manage all of the ways that the gods were manipulated with rituals and sacrifices to influence them and make things happen in certain ways. I think that this is true of any religion including Judaism and even Christianity in many of its forms.
      But when Jesus declared that it didn’t really matter where you worship God – whether in Jerusalem or Samaria – because God was spirit, he was really declaring but he didn’t believe in that kind of God – the kind of God who could be manipulated with our religion.
      And, it must be said, that this was a very dangerous thing for him to say because what was at stake was not only the question of where one might worship God. Religion, in all of its forms, has built up these complex power structures over the centuries. If the priests and religious leaders are able to manipulate the gods and so control the terrible things that may happen in this world, then they are extraordinarily powerful and they can use that power as leverage in other areas of life. That’s how religion becomes a powerful tool for manipulating whole populations and for amassing great wealth, which is what it has been for much of human history.
      But Jesus, with one short phrase, “God is Spirit,”throws all of that carefully developed power structure to the wind. And I almost mean that literally. There was just one word – both in the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke and in the Greek language of the gospel – one word that was used to speak of both spirit and wind. Pneuma, in Greek, is a word that mean both spirit and wind. Ruach, in Hebrew also means both spirit and wind. So when Jesus calls God spirit he is also calling God wind and, as Jesus says elsewhere in this same gospel, “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
      Jesus was saying that, if God is spirit, then God is about as easy to nail down and control as the wind. And I realize that we, as modern people do have a better understanding of where the wind comes from and where it goes, than did the people of Jesus’ time. We know about atmospheric pressures and air currents and how they can influence and change the flows of the wind. But all our knowledge has not brought us to the place where we can make it blow when, where and as hard as we want it to. If we could do that, we would have shut down the fire in Fort McMurray so easily, but we can’t. If the goal of our relgion is to bring God under our control and get him to behave and make life play out as we want, we will be sorely disappointed.
      Religion has always had one other goal other than the controlling of the gods. It has also been very useful (especially for those who are most powerful in society) as a way to control populations. Religion has been used to make people to behave in certain ways, to make sure that they don’t ask for too much in the way of change or reform. The fear of the gods and the promise of the religious power structure to control the divine powers in this world has been used to impose laws and standards of behaviour on people and to teach them that they must tolerate the present structures of the world rather than to ask for change.
      This power too is destroyed by that one simple phrase, “God is spirit.” We see that in our reading from the letter of Paul to the church in Galatia where Paul writes, “if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law.” If God is spirit then God is not outside of you telling you through laws and words and scriptures how you ought to behave, God is within you prompting your behaviour in quite unpredictable ways.
      Now it must be said that the Christian church has had a troubled history with that declaration of the absolute freedom of believers that is proclaimed in passages like this one. The church has sought to govern over the actions and even the thoughts of its people through laws and rules and power structures, but the original declaraton of your freedom remains there in the scriptures and so, I pray, it will never be forgotten by God’s people.  
      So, with just three words, “God is spirit,” Jesus really does do a lot to destroy the traditional ways in which people have imagined God and how they have tended to work out their relationshiop with God. It is, I believe, one reason why, in those early centuries, people saw how the Christians lived and declared that they were dangerous atheists – people who did not believe in God in the ways you were supposed to believe in God.
      Now, it is it is important to note that Jesus, in saying such things, is not throwing us into the chaos of a Godless world where anything could go wrong at any moment and nothing has any meaning. Jesus does still believe in God, and the God that he does believe in is clearly a God who is extraordinarily gracious and kind and caring. It is a God who he speaks of, above all, as Abba – a word that we will examine in more detail in several weeks. So clearly, it is not Jesus’ intention to leave us with the impression that we are stuck going through life in a dangerous universe where anything can go wrong and nothing ever makes any sense. There is a God and we can trust that God is gracious. It is just that we cannot expect to control that God through our religious practices. We do those things for different reasons.
      In the same way, Paul insists, our freedom from the obligation to follow the law does not make us immoral and dangerous people who will inevitably degenerate into the worse excesses of behaviour. He insists that God, as spirit within us, prompts us to the highest of impulses, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”
      So do not be afraid of those three words, “God is spirit,” and where they will lead us. But they definitely disturb the ways in which the world has learned to think about God. I think it was one of the things that led to that anti-Christian accusation of atheist. Though Jesus seems to have been clear on this matter, it seems that the church has long struggled with such a view of God. It seems to be easier to fall into the old ways of thinking about and relating to God. All it seems to cost us is our freedom – our freedom from law and from fear.
      Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could just get so hung up on the radical ways in which Jesus spoke about God that it would transform us? Wouldn’t it be amazing if the outside world looked at us and said, “I’ve never seen a people who believed in a God like that! Doesn’t remind me of any God I’ve ever heard of.” And then, maybe, they would ask to learn more about the God that we worship.
       

         #TodaysTweetableTruth #Jesus said God=Spirit, presenting view of God so new it seemed atheistic. What if we had such a radical view of God? 

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Warrior’s Wardrobe

Posted by on Sunday, May 8th, 2016 in Minister

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Hespeler, 8 May, 2016 © Scott McAndless – Mother’s Day
1 Samuel 18:1-9, Ephesians 6:10-17, Psalm 3
W
hen I was a student studying at Presbyterian College in Montreal, I was given an extraordinary opportunity – an opportunity that few students for the ministry are afforded these days. There was a small church in the city of Laval, just across the bridge north of Montreal, called Northlea United Church. It was a church that was struggling as an English church in what had once been, but was no longer, a fairly strong English community.
      The church needed a minister to care for them but couldn’t afford fulltime ministry. A student seemed like an excellent option for them, but the United Church, as a matter of policy, wouldn’t allow their ministry students to minister in that way. The Presbyterian College didn’t mind if their married students (I don’t know why, but you had to be married) did take a pastoral charge while studying, but there were no Presbyterian congregations in need of a student minister. So, when I (a married student) came along, I was asked, “Say, would you like a job preaching to and taking care of a little United Church in Laval for a bit of money and a manse to live in,” I jumped at the chance.
      It worked out beautifully and not just for the obvious financial reasons. I still believe that that church taught me at least as much about being a minister as the college did. I had this wonderful place where I could take the things that I was learning in classes and apply them to the real life of the church while I was learning them. I had this place where I could go and make mistakes and get things wrong – and yes, I made lots of mistakes and got lots of things wrong – and the people still loved me and we worked through any of the ensuing problems together.
      When I finally finished my studies and was ready to move on to my next steps as an ordained minister in a Presbyterian Church, the people of Northlea threw us a party. They gave thanks for all that they had shared with us. They gave us their blessing and promised to pray for us. And they gave me a gift: this preaching gown.
      I have carried this gown with me ever since and worn it a lot. It has seen a lot of joyous occasions and more than its share of bad ones. It almost didn’t make it. Once, several years ago, I was wearing it at the end of a service following a baptism. I had carried a lit candle out of the service, put down the candle and then turned around and just happened to lean a little bit too far back. But, with a few minor repairs, the gown made it through. I am glad to still have it and still wear it from time to time. I reminds me of some of the really important and meaningful things I learned from and shared with the people of Northlea United Church in Laval. In many ways, they are still a part of everything that I do as a minister.
      When, a little while later, I was ordained in my first charge, I received another item of clothing. This stole (designed to go nicely with my robe) was presented to me by my mother. Not only was it presented by her, it was made by her and by my three sisters each one of whom took her turn with the stitching. When I wear it, it reminds me that so much of what I bring to the work that I do is what I bring from my family who did so much to form me and build me up.
      And then, a few years ago, as you all know, there was someone who I thought of as both a friend and a mentor. His name was the Rev. Ruggles Constant. When I first arrived here in Hespeler as a minister, Ruggles was dealing with many health issues and was quite limited in what he could do, but he certainly went out of his way to support me and to pass on some of his wisdom and experience in really helpful ways. When he passed away two years ago, I was honoured when he asked me to preach at his funeral and a little puzzled when he told me that I was to preach on the topic of the full armour of God – the passage we read this morning from the New Testament.
      Ruggles’ daughter, Stephanie, did two wonderful things for me. She told me that her father had been kidding and I could preach on whatever I thought was best and she gave me Ruggles’ gown. When I have worn it since, I have been greatly comforted to know that Ruggles continues to be with me.
     And then there is this stole given to me by someone in this congregation. Another supporting friend and, in her own way, a mentor.
      This is, for me, a very special wardrobe that I carry with me. I’m sure that you understand that, for me, the value of this wardrobe is much more than just the value of the textiles.
      When I came to this morning’s reading from 1 Samuel, this wardrobe was what came to my mind. In this passage we find ourselves in the middle of the tumultuous times of King Saul, first king of Israel. Saul came to be king in a time of great danger, when the people of Israel faced their greatest threat to date in the form of a very frightening enemy called the Philistines. Better equipped and better organized, the Philistines threatened to wipe the Israelites from the face of the earth. And Saul was able to do what nobody had been able to do before and created an army that could fight back against the Philistines in a disciplined and organized way.
      Saul’s success was perhaps limited. It was not as if he made the threat go away, but he was able to organize a real resistance – more sustained victory than anyone, even Samson, had been able to do. Saul did slay his thousands of enemies. And his son, Jonathan, to whom he hoped to pass the kingdom someday, also became a great warrior. Everything was, well, maybe not perfect but as good as it had ever been.
      And then David came along. And it wasn’t as if David was perfect; he clearly had his flaws. But he definitely was someone who had potential. He was a leader like few others had ever been. And both Saul and Jonathan seem to have recognized that immediately.
      Saul saw David’s ability as a threat. Here was the man who was potentially a better war leader than Saul had ever been – who could lead men to attack and kill tens of thousands where before Saul had merely slaughtered thousands. Someone like that could get good enough to take over the kingdom from him. So Saul began to plot to bring David down.
      But Jonathan, Saul’s son, seeing the exact same potential in David, had the exact opposite reaction. Of course, David was just as much a threat to Jonathan and his future as king as he was to his father. But rather than responding with fear or with that common response of wanting to put someone else down in order to bring yourself up, Jonathan was able to respond with grace.
      And that is what it means when he takes off his armour and sword and arms and even his very robe and gives it all to David. In essence Jonathan is taking everything that he has built up for himself up until that point in his life – his reputation as a warrior and a leader, his skill and training, his status and making a gift of it to David. David hasn’t earned any of this yet. Yes, he did bring down Goliath with one well-placed stone, but that could have been a lucky shot. There is a great distance between that and being a great leader of men. But Jonathan’s gift opened up all of those possibilities and closed off the likelier possibility that David would have just ended up a forgotten footnote to history.
      Jonathan’s gift leads me to think in two particular directions. As I have already said, it makes me think of all of those people who, in their own ways, gave of themselves so that I might become the person that God was calling me to be. It is Mother’s Day, of course, so I cannot help but think of my own mother. It is Christian Family Sunday so I cannot help but think of all of the ways in which my family nurtured me, taught me and even sacrificed of themselves for my sake. And, of course, it is not just family who do that for us, though they often do it in the most enduring way.
      Families, by the way, are also so influential on our development that they can do the most damage to us when they let us down and they can put wounds in us that we end up carrying for the rest of our lives. So if you are able to remember all that you received from your family and you find that you have been blessed by them and sent on your way through this life in a positive way, you have been, in fact, extraordinarily blessed – more so than many if not most of the people in the world today. Your first application of this story, therefore, is to remember your mother and your family and give thanks to God for all that they have been to you.
      On this Mother’s Day and Christian Family Sunday, if it is possible for you to do so, take the opportunity to thank your mother and those other people in your family for all of those sacrificial ways in which they acted to make you who you are.
      And after your family, remember the others who invested in you – all those who, like Jonathan, took the wisdom and honour and standing that they had built up and were willing to invest some of it in you. Every single one of you has had people like that. Do you realize what an incredible gift that was? I know that I could not be who I am today without the people of Northlea United, without my teachers and mentors, without the influence of incredibly wise and gifted men and women like a certain Ruggles Constant. On this day, if it is still possible for you to do so, would it not be good for you to do whatever you could to show your gratitude to those people in your life.
      But that is not the truly exciting thing about this story of David and Jonathan. The blessing in this story is that we sometimes get to be David and have other people build into our lives. The exciting opportunity about this story is that we also get to be Jonathan and to build into the lives of others. Every person here has the opportunity to do that. It may be someone in your family – a child, a grandchild, a niece or nephew. It may be some associate, someone in your social group. It most certainly could be someone in this congregation – a young person perhaps or someone somewhere on the fringes of this congregation – but I assure you that, if you look around, God is placing those opportunities to invest the human capital that you have built up into someone in your path.
      You may ask why you should do that – why you should be willing to give of yourself or sacrifice of yourself for the sake of another. I will admit that it is something that seems not to make much sense according to the way of thinking of this world. This world is mostly interested in Saul’s approach – is much more inclined to want to keep others down in order to protect its own interests. I’ll be honest, this is an approach that I have even seen too often in the church. No sooner does someone start to accomplish something and build a worthwhile ministry or outreach than other people start to tear them down, criticize them and otherwise make sure that they don’t get too big for their britches.
      The world may favour Saul’s approach, but God favours Jonathan’s. When you choose to invest yourself in others for the sake of the kingdom of God, God will bless that and bring amazing things out of it. The greatness in Jonathan, because of his choice to share it graciously with David, became something that endured long beyond Jonathan’s life. It continued through the kingdom that David built and the dynasty that he founded. It continued and continues still through his distant descendant, Jesus the Christ. That opportunity to do something important, significant and lasting is God’s gift to you.
     
#TodaysTweetableTruth You can be a Saul and put others down to lift up yourself up or you can be a Jonathan and invest your life in a David.

Here is a video introducing our next sermon series that begins on May 15, 2016


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A Ribbon Cutting

Posted by on Friday, May 6th, 2016 in News

Yesterday (Thursday) was Food Bank day. We had some fun cutting the ribbon on our brand new freezer.

A BIG SHOUT OUT to Nelson Aggregates & Jonas Appliances for your generosity in providing the freezer (and delivery).  This will be a huge help for us to be able to continue to reach out to our community to provide much needed help.
Over 30 families in the Hespeler community are served every other week, with more new people coming each Food Bank day.
Thank you to everyone who helped to make this possible.




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